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Re: standards of speech intelligibilty for the hearing impaired?

Last night in his presidential lecture "Using Psychoacoustics to Explore Cochlear Function: Basic Mechanisms and Applications to Hearing Aids" at the ARO meeting in Phoenix where he got the big award, BCJ Moore summarized a lot of very interesting stuff that's been learned over the years about various forms of hearing impairment. It's not well understood at all, but some impaired listeners seem to lose the ability to access temporal fine structure (TFS), while others are less impaired in this regard. The ones who lose access to TFS seem also to be worse at listening "in the gaps" in fluctuating interference.
My impression, however, is that if one knew enough characterization of an individual's loss, then one would have a hope of modeling it in a way that would lead to intelligibility loss predictions. But it's more complicated than something that's likely to be a standard method any time soon.
Moore has developed some testing techniques that can identify different types of loss; he talked especially about identifying "dead regions" (IHC function loss) in the cochlea, and the kinds of processing strategies that helped or didn't in such cases. You can't get there with the simple acoustic measurements (tone thresholds) that audiologists typically rely on.
This is not my specialty; forgive me if I've over-simplified or mangled what I heard. 

Dick


At 4:46 PM -0800 2/20/08, Chuping Liu wrote:

Dear List,

I wonder if there are standards describing speech
intelligibility for the hearing impaired from acoustic
measurement? If yes, what are they? If no, what make
such a standard impossible?

Thanks,
Chuping

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